O’Conall Street

The news that the UUP and the Conservative Party are to reignite their old relationship is not I am afraid the minor political earthquake which top Tory blogger Iain Dale is describing it as.

Even after their fallout in the eighties over the Anglo Irish Agreement the parties remained sisters in Europe and soul buddies at Westminster. David Trimble was always a one nation Tory as have been the majority of UUP MPs ever elected to the commons. That Trimble (a Tory peer) is being touted as a prospective member of the shadow cabinet is hardly surprising.

Looking at it from an NI perspective it is hard to see what the UUP gains. It will not affect their Assembly presence nor will it assist in the reorganisation and rejuvenation of the party locally. Fact is the only people who can fix the UUP’s problems in NI are the UUP itself.

Things are different when you consider the implications for the Tories in Westminster. The next election could be a very tight run thing and having any number of UUP MP’s on board and ready to support the government can only be good news for Mr Cameron. He can claim to have a footprint in every corner of the UK, all be it a very small one in Scotland and Wales, becoming a truely one nation party again. What ever that means….

The UK is becoming increasingly regionalised and politics is less London centric than ever and the UK is less united than at any time since the Act of Union. You could argue that integration of political forces across the UK runs against the clear desire of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to enjoy greater autonomy and express their individual identities, social and economic priorities in a more powerful way.

Should the inevitable happen, and I believe their is an air of inevitability about all this, the one thing the UUP is going to have to watch out for are the conflicts of interest which will arise if the Tories are in government in London and the UUP are in the Executive in Belfast.

When an issue of difference arises who will they stand by?

Their Leader and Prime Minister or the people of Northern Ireland?

This is a problem the DUP are unlikely ever to have and all politics is, I am afraid, local.

Blogging councillors. What next?

Belfast’s latest young gun, the SDLP’s Cllr Niall Kelly (Balmoral DEA) has jumped into the blogosphere head first and to date his online musing are proving insightful and entertaining. I understand from Cllr N Kelly (the other being Cllr Bernie Kelly, also SDLP, also Balmoral DEA) that he intends uploading details of council business and regular news for constituents as well as his own general political commentary.

As a communications tool, blogging, digital and social media offer councillors a real opportunity to communicate in a time and cost effective manner with all their target audiences as well as allowing them to campaign on a broader range of issues online then they could ever do through traditional media.  

Check him out at BelfastStoop.com . He posted a fun Youtube video the other day on the US election which I am unashamedley uploading on O’Conall Street.  

I don’t want to moan today about the Power Sharing Executive which never meets or about the French President who came and left.

It may be summer but there is no evidence of the mood lightening in political terms on this island. In fact we are told today that Sinn Fein are willing to negotiate all summer to break the deadlock in the Executive and by Mr Adams that Ireland needs to negotiate all summer with Europe over what he describes and as the ‘dead’ Lisbon treaty. I am sure the government appreciate Mr Adam’s word of advice but am told there are more than a few TD’s believe the Sinn Fein’s priority should be the day job and the bread and butter in the North that need immediate attention.  

On a more summery theme, came across an interesting article last night about that other old chestnut, creationism. Slate.com has a piece by Christopher Hitchens about Salamanders and Creationism. It’s a great read and I have reproduced below for your intellectual enrichment.

It is extremely seldom that one has the opportunity to think a new thought about a familiar subject, let alone an original thought on a contested subject, so when I had a moment of eureka a few nights ago, my very first instinct was to distrust my very first instinct. To phrase it briefly, I was watching the astonishing TV series Planet Earth (which, by the way, contains photography of the natural world of a sort that redefines the art) and had come to the segment that deals with life underground. The subterranean caverns and rivers of our world are one of the last unexplored frontiers, and the sheer extent of the discoveries, in Mexico and Indonesia particularly, is quite enough to stagger the mind. Various creatures were found doing their thing far away from the light, and as they were caught by the camera, I noticed—in particular of the salamanders—that they had typical faces. In other words, they had mouths and muzzles and eyes arranged in the same way as most animals. Except that the eyes were denoted only by little concavities or indentations. Even as I was grasping the implications of this, the fine voice of Sir David Attenborough was telling me how many millions of years it had taken for these denizens of the underworld to lose the eyes they had once possessed.

If you follow the continuing argument between the advocates of Darwin’s natural selection theory and the partisans of creationism or “intelligent design,” you will instantly see what I am driving at. The creationists (to give them their proper name and to deny them their annoying annexation of the word intelligent) invariably speak of the eye in hushed tones. How, they demand to know, can such a sophisticated organ have gone through clumsy evolutionary stages in order to reach its current magnificence and versatility? The problem was best phrased by Darwin himself, in his essay “Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication”:

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

His defenders, such as Michael Shermer in his excellent book Why Darwin Matters, draw upon post-Darwinian scientific advances. They do not rely on what might be loosely called “blind chance”:

Evolution also posits that modern organisms should show a variety of structures from simple to complex, reflecting an evolutionary history rather than an instantaneous creation. The human eye, for example, is the result of a long and complex pathway that goes back hundreds of millions of years. Initially a simple eyespot with a handful of light-sensitive cells that provided information to the organism about an important source of the light …

Hold it right there, says Ann Coulter in her ridiculous book Godless: The Church of Liberalism. “The interesting question is not: How did a primitive eye become a complex eye? The interesting question is: How did the ‘light-sensitive cells’ come to exist in the first place?”

The salamanders of Planet Earth appear to this layman to furnish a possibly devastating answer to that question. Humans are almost programmed to think in terms of progress and of gradual yet upward curves, even when confronted with evidence that the past includes as many great dyings out of species as it does examples of the burgeoning of them. Thus even Shermer subconsciously talks of a “pathway” that implicitly stretches ahead. But what of the creatures who turned around and headed back in the opposite direction, from complex to primitive in point of eyesight, and ended up losing even the eyes they did have?

Whoever benefits from this inquiry, it cannot possibly be Coulter or her patrons at the creationist Discovery Institute. The most they can do is to intone that “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” Whereas the likelihood that the post-ocular blindness of underground salamanders is another aspect of evolution by natural selection seems, when you think about it at all, so overwhelmingly probable as to constitute a near certainty. I wrote to professor Richard Dawkins to ask if I had stumbled on the outlines of a point, and he replied as follows:

Vestigial eyes, for example, are clear evidence that these cave salamanders must have had ancestors who were different from them—had eyes, in this case. That is evolution. Why on earth would God create a salamander with vestiges of eyes? If he wanted to create blind salamanders, why not just create blind salamanders? Why give them dummy eyes that don’t work and that look as though they were inherited from sighted ancestors? Maybe your point is a little different from this, in which case I don’t think I have seen it written down before.

I recommend for further reading the chapter on eyes and the many different ways in which they are formed that is contained in Dawkins’ Climbing Mount Improbable; also “The Blind Cave Fish’s Tale” in his Chaucerian collection The Ancestor’s Tale. I am not myself able to add anything about the formation of light cells, eyespots, and lenses, but I do think that there is a dialectical usefulness to considering the conventional arguments in reverse, as it were. For example, to the old theistic question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” we can now counterpose the findings of professor Lawrence Krauss and others, about the foreseeable heat death of the universe, the Hubble “red shift” that shows the universe’s rate of explosive expansion actually increasing, and the not-so-far-off collision of our own galaxy with Andromeda, already loomingly visible in the night sky. So, the question can and must be rephrased: “Why will our brief ’something’ so soon be replaced with nothing?” It’s only once we shake our own innate belief in linear progression and consider the many recessions we have undergone and will undergo that we can grasp the gross stupidity of those who repose their faith in divine providence and godly design.

It is hard to believe that Iris Robinson MP, MLA, should find herself in the eye of the storm again but today, on the Nolan Show, she is reported as asserting that it was the ‘Government’s role to uphold God’s law’.

Iris is entitled to her beliefs and entitled to protection from persecution for what she believes in.  

The fact that she can make such statements on air is because we live in a liberal secular society. Secularism is the assertion that governmental practices or institutions should exist separately from religion or religious belief.

It asserts the right to be free from religious rule and teachings, and freedom from the government imposition of religion upon the people, within a state that is neutral on matters of belief, and gives no state privileges or subsidies to religions. It allows for the proper separation of Church and State.

This is not an anti religious principle. Quite the opposite. It asserts the freedom of religious belief and the right of churches to organise and promote their faith without interference or intimidation from the state or society.

The Government has an altogether different role and duty and that is to legislate for the freedom to follow all beliefs and none. I know where I stand on this issue. It will be interesting to see where the majority of people on this island stand. 

Great debate on the radio this morning about the now infamous front page of the current edition of the New Yorker. I am inclined to come down on the side of free speech although If I were in the Obama campaign I might feel this one could be far too easily exploited by opponents. You can appreciate that they will want to do everything possible to ensure the most electable democrat in a decade gets his cigar in November.

Kathleen Parker has a good piece on RealClearPolitics which is worth a read.  She argues that satire must be protected for free speech to be strengthened:

“The intent of the illustration should be clear to anyone attuned to current events. Cartoonist Barry Blitt was poking fun at all the rumors and fearsome phobias circulating about the Obamas among a certain contingent. We know who they are.

Viral e-mails claim, for instance, that Obama is a Muslim; that Obama was sworn into the Senate using a Koran instead of a Bible; that Obama isn’t a patriot because he refuses to wear a flag pin or put his hand over his heart during the national anthem; that Michelle Obama is militantly anti-American. And so on.

All these claims have been clarified and/or refuted for anyone curious enough to seek the truth. Even so, a certain percentage of people will continue to believe what they choose no matter what.

In any case, those about whom the outraged presumably are most concerned are: (1) unlikely to pick up a New Yorker; (2) unlikely to be swayed or disabused of their preconceptions. So what exactly are they worried about?

That yahoos just passing by a newsstand will see those images and have their paranoid suspicions confirmed?

Such is elitism at its most self-destructive. Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and former New Yorker staffer, put it nicely to the San Francisco Chronicle: “The essence of what they’re saying is, ‘I get it, but I don’t trust the people in Kansas to get it.’”

Sanitizing satire either to buffer the sensitivities of those who consider themselves more highly evolved — or to withhold kindling from those deemed less sophisticated — is all of a piece.

Ignorance is the common denominator.

While one strain of ignorance likely springs from misinformation or a lack of educated knowledge, the other is more virulent by virtue of its opposite circumstances”.

They are debating the new Belfast Logo on the radio as I speak. Reaction is generally positive.

Russell Brand claims to have coined MILF in tribute to the very elegant Sadie Frost. Now US political blog, Wonkette, has taken the sexual fantasy a step further with GILF (Governors I Love to ….) and the top GILF is none other than Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. This darling of the conservative right and now officially America’s hottest governor, is being tipped as a potential running mate for John McCain in November. And just to reinforce her home town credentials she is a former beauty queen too.

This is, I know, a very sad excuse to put pictures of good looking politicians on O’Conall Street but in the Twelfth week anything to lighten the mood.

With the French Cabinet also brimming with attractive ministers of a centre right persuasion I am reminded of a question which has dogged me since adolescence.

How come conservative parties always have better looking ladies?

Are Fianna Fail Social Democrats? That’s the question which is being posed today by SDLP MLA, Patsy McGlone.

Just a week after Mark Durkan said the party was not for sale and Brian Cowen said there was little chance of FF organising North pf the border in the short or medium term, the Mid Ulster MLA has come up with an interesting proposition - that FF and the SDLP enter into a ‘contract for social democracy’ .

According to the Sunday Business Post, McGlone said the SDLP had to consider realigning on an all-Ireland basis, as the economy, culture and sport were all coming together on that basis.

”On a personal level, it is a widely-held view of many of us in the SDLP that the natural alliance is on social democratic grounds with Fianna Fáil,” he said. ”Quite clearly, Fianna Fáil is representative of the same body, socially and economically, as ourselves, because we have a common inheritance of constitutional republicanism.

”There is a commonality of spirit with the parties in the Republic, but to a greater extent with Fianna Fáil.”

McGlone is in favour of a ”contract for social democracy” with Fianna Fáil, ensuring economic growth and protection of the least well-off. The link would mean a strong nationalist alternative to Sinn Fein, capable of putting Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party under pressure.

”People are saying to me that it’s good there is an executive, but what legislation have we seen? What investment? Young mothers are asking what is happening with the education system,” said McGlone.

But he said that, while a linkup was needed, laying down a time-scale would be wrong. ”There is a progression of negotiation, of talks, of different emphases within different parties in any dialogue,” he said.

He is open as to whether the SDLP should merge completely with Fianna Fáil, or have a looser alliance. ”There may be something radical out there in terms of structure which has not been considered.”

This interesting intervention from the Mid Ulster MLA is not without difficulty. As a social democratic party the SDLP is a sister party of the Irish Labour Party and a full member of the Party of European Socialists. Is Patsy suggesting that Fianna Fail should also become part of this international fraternity? 

Mark Durkan’s remarks last week were clearly designed to close this debate and a response to the growing view within the Party that the SDLP and its principles are not for sale. If you ask very, very many members they will tell you that they want to be in a strong SDLP, not FF, FG, Lab or the PDs.

One thing for sure. The endless discussion about the SDLP’s future lying in the hands of others is a distraction from the real challenges facing the party, to reorganise, recruit new members and renew its policy platform.  All three of which are surely a prerequisite for successful future realignment.

Mr McGlone is right. The SDLP need to become more of an opposition in the North. That is something they can achieve themselves if they put their mind to it.

As for his offer of a contract with a social democratic FF, the ball is now in the soldiers of destiny’s court. Many will be very interested to hear their response, particularly given their commitment to private sector involvement in the southern health service.

 The Belfast Telegraph asked me to write a short article about the shifting sands of the Orange Order’s reputation for today’s paper . Mine is below. Nick Garbutt who runs ASITIS PR here in Belfast has a piece in too, as does William Logan of former Sovereign Grand Master of the Orange Order (i’ll post a link to both when they appear on the paper’s website).  

June and July used to be dominated by parading, civil unrest and ‘street politics’ which forced many to flee on early holidays, damaged business and did Northern Ireland’s reputation abroad no good what so ever.

This year the first parading story came with a relatively minor spat between the Orange Order and Larne Council over bunting, yes bunting!

Over the past year the Orange Order have began a gradual process creating a more positive public perception of the organisation. There was real progress in the early part of the year as the Order worked closely with the Northern Ireland Tourist Board and Tourism Ireland to develop the Twelfth as a tourist proposition and more recently with the launch of the all Ireland Williamite Trail. Both welcome initiatives which over time could help shift perceptions.

The jury may be out in many minds about Diamond Dan, but I am not going to belittle a serious attempt to engage young people in the positive aspects of orangeism.

Yes, progress at a strategic level but communications need to relate to experience before perceptions are changed. In other words you need to walk the walk as well as talking the talk.

Back to the Twelfth. 

There is undoubtedly still a perception gap between what the Order says and what people see on the ground. Take my own experience for example. I live off a major arterial route in South Belfast. I am not going to take the position that Orange feet have no right to be on that road but I do believe that with rights come responsibilities. Ours is a little cul-de-sac which means we are ‘locked in’ during the parade.

Last year we were at home for the day. The morning procession passed off without too much ado but on the return walk back into the city things were pretty bad. I counted 56 people (many in sashes) using our little street as a toilet. All in all the parade took two hours to pass. After about an hour I gave up on the toilet count and retreated to the back garden but had to confront reality when a group of young girls from a band came knocking on the door begging to use the loo. I would love to have spoken to the adult responsible for these young ladies. They are entitled to access to basic facilities from the parade organisers.

If the Orange Order is serious about shifting public perceptions then surely the time has arrived when it should provide portaloos, litter points and properly marshal its flagship parade. Most of my neighbours have the economic means to leave on the Twelfth. This is a major reason why this part of Belfast has to date been happy to live and let live. That is no excuse for bringing tens of thousands on to the streets and making inadequate arrangements for them.

Next year I might put the Twelfth to the experience test but on Saturday I will be heading off as I suspect will the vast majority of my neighbours and by the time we return the council will have tidied everything up again - at our expense.

The much written about crisis in the Executive hit the BBC today and all the fingers are pointing at Sinn Fein who appear to be on a political version of a go slow over the DUP’s refusal to agree to an Irish Language Bill and the devolution of policing and justice.

There is an Executive meeting scheduled for July 24.

Will they meet to discuss the future of the eleven plus, water charges, PPS 14, Social Housing or gambling to mention just a few. Or will they place an Irish Language Bill in a category above all other policy and one which must be addressed before anything else can happen?

I cant believe I am writing this.

Off to worry about house prices!

Wondering if anyone in the Executive is?

Last week the French Ambassador to the UK may have described his president as a political force of nature but this summer a man who has not even been elected to the highest office will cross the atlantic like a a great warm wind. Obama is coming to Europe.

The media tell us he intends to make a major foreign policy speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, an honour normally reserved for American presidents. He may be the presumptive nominee in the US but in Germany it appears he is already the presumptive president.

According to the International Herald Tribune:

Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit said the capital would be thrilled to welcome Obama, wherever he wanted to speak.“Of course the Brandenburg Gate is an important symbol and we would be delighted if one of the most promising presidential candidates, namely Barack Obama, would use Berlin as a platform, either before the Brandenburg Gate or elsewhere in the city,” Wowereit told N24 broadcaster.

Wowereit diplomatically added that Berlin would also welcome Republican candidate John McCain.

The prospect of an Obama presidency has excited many in Germany, where trans-Atlantic relations have cooled significantly during the tenure of President George W. Bush. A poll of 501 Germans conducted last Thursday for the Bild am Sonntag newspaper found that 72 percent would like to see Obama win the presidency, with just 11 percent preferring McCain. Bild am Sonntag did not give a margin of error.

In the past, only sitting U.S. presidents — not candidates — have had the honor of addressing a crowd in front of the Brandenburg Gate, which has symbolized both a divided and later a united Germany.

Ronald Reagan memorably stood on the former West German side of the Brandenburg Gate in 1987, exhorting Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to “open this gate” and “tear down this wall” — referring to the Berlin Wall that for decades divided the city in two.

In 1994, Bill Clinton symbolically spoke from the other, formerly Eastern, side, declaring “Berlin is free!” In 2002, the former U.S. president addressed a crowd of 1 million at the formal unveiling of the newly refurbished monument.

Although John F. Kennedy did not speak at the Brandenburg Gate, his declaration in Berlin of solidarity with besieged West Berliners in 1963 — “Ich bin ein Berliner” — is deeply remembered here.

With his message of hope, his relative youth and his trim figure, Obama has often been compared to Kennedy, especially in the eyes of many Germans.

Also on the trip will be visits to London and France. It is a terrible pity he is not coming here. I am quite sure the streets of Dublin and Belfast would fill to welcome a man who has put hope back into politics.